Title: The 9/11 Commission
Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States

Fiction? Anthology?

Publisher:W. W.
Norton

Date: 2004

ISBN:0-393-32671-3

Series Name:

Physical description: paperback, 567 pg, of which 107 are
footnotes

Relevance to DOASKDOTELL: terrorism

Review: This book was published with great fanfare on July 22, 2004, with a major press
conference that day, with the book going on sale at noon.

Mr. Kean gave a sobering warning in his public
statement, about the zeal of the asymmetric, ideological enemy and our lack
of preparedness. The book backs up his statements in matter-of-fact,
reasonable fashion of topical fourteen chapters (the first is entitled the
chilling “We Have Some Planes”). “Is it safe”? asks
the dentist in MarathonMan.
“We are not safe.”

There has been a lack of imagination, both in government and in the
public. In 102 minutes (the length of an average feature film) on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the
nature of our collective moral reality changed forever.One can say that Tom Clancy or Robert
Ludlum, or may even Stephen King can provide us with the imagination to
enumerate all the possible motives of attack. Part of the imagination,
though, comes in understanding the hate—generating the horror-filled class
that has the methods of destruction, maybe even ending free liberal
civilization. A major concept that we missed was suicide—we see it from
Palestinians but had never considered it on the scale of hijackings, and we
badly overlooked the cultural phenomenon that some young men, especially,
might see death as a way to be important and to make a “statement” (raising
an ordinary family just isn’t good enough, and may not be an opportunity
anyway).We can talk about the
political immaturity, corruption and backwardness of regimes in much of the
Muslim world, but that does not itself account for the paradigm behind our
problem. The book explains this—the ideology of Osama bin Laden (or Usama bin Laden) back to the virtuous nihilism of SayyidQutb—and this seems to
extend beyond the specific grievances over Palestine
or infidels in Arabia. There is genuine controversy
over whether Al Qaeda hates just American foreign policy or American psyche
and modernism—they are seen as inseparable. Osama bin Laden does what he does
because he can.It’s like saying one
evil person will frame another self-indulgent but benign person just for the
expression of authority.It’s a kind
of evil that is the sum of a converging series of evil. The most remarkable
fact is the paradigm itself: a non-state, even one determined individual, can
infect or poison modern pluralistic civilization and bring it low, to subsume
to religious meritocracy, a kind of finality and permanence.What strikes me about all of this is how
similar it is to saying that one determined writer can alter the democratic
political process, and how unacceptable it is to give in to domestic or
mundane goals of others.

The problems were, he says, systemic, and the authors recommend a radical
reorganization of intelligence functions. (To blame everyone is to blame no
one.)They seem to be aiming for more
centralization, which is not necessarily a good idea if bureaucracy
oversimplifies the details of “imagination.” From what I can tell, however,
the authors talk little or none about the sacrifices that could be expected
of ordinary Americans (we could talk about the steganography
problem and ordinary use of the Internet)—probably because a radical change
in our way of life, imposed by an external agent—seems so plainly
unthinkable.

The authors give terse but detailed accounts of the events of that day,
including reaching the conclusion that the Air Force might not have been able
to shoot down Flight 93 in time, so the passengers really did save further
catastrophe at the Capitol or White House. (By the way, ground eye witnesses
known to me claim that the Flight 93 plane was turning slightly farther west
that generally reported, and very low to the ground, and might well have
crashed about four miles northwest of the town of Kipton,
Ohio, where I had spent my boyhood summers in the 50s.) The single most
horrific event of all could be a nuclear explosion that could reach both the
White House and Congress when both are occupied—a total decapitation of
government that the hijackers attempted on 9/11. I hope I don’t survive such
an incident since I live in nearby Arlington—and
does a “self-promoting queer” like me have anything to offer a world that is
left, if mullahs are pointing rifles to convert me to Islam? (The delays of
some of the hijacked flights may have prevented this government wipeout or
overthrow possibility anyway on 9/11, even if Flight 93 had reached its
target—those buildings were already evacuated. Wired has proposed
efficient and automated highway radiation technologies to prevent radioactive
materials from being brought undetected into cities, although I don’t know if
they could see through lead containers.)Michael Moore notwithstanding, there is no objective evidence that
members of the Bin Laden family were given preferential treatment in getting
out of the country.

9/11/ panelist John Lehman gave an interview (July 24, 2004) to Washington Times
reporter Guy Taylor, in which he predicted that both Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia
were at substantial risk of overthrow by radical fundamentalists. With Saudi
Arabia this could lead to a total cutoff
of oil (and maybe “self-destruction” of oil fields), and with Pakistan
it could lead to the exchange of nukes. America
is not prepared economically to deal with such an event. So military
intervention in these countries could be expected by any administration,
which also adds pressure to resume the draft. The sky is falling—chicken
little.